Earlier this year, Netflix released yet another droplet in its ever-continuing deluge of TV content, the graphic novel adaptation The End Of The Fucking (or F***king, if you want to be cute about it) World. We ended up liking the series quite a bit (even if, as our own Josh Modell noted at the time, it felt much more like a 160-minute movie than eight 20-minute episodes of TV). In fact, a lot of people apparently liked it, much to the surprise—and, in a weird way, frustration—of its parent service.
This is per a recent Vulture profile, which reports that Netflix massively under-anticipated how well World, which stars Alex Lawther and Jessica Barden as a pair of young lovers on a psychopathic spree across England, would do. (Factors against it apparently included its dark subject matter, plus the fact that it had already aired in full in the U.K.) As far as problems go, “People like our stuff too much” is a good one to have, but it’s still something of a frustration for a company that prides itself on knowing what people will watch, when they’ll watch it, and exactly how much to pay for any given movie or show. “It was astounding how popular it was for us,” Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos told Vulture. “On one level, it was a massive failure that we didn’t see it coming,” he said, while also noting that, for all the company’s metric-tracking and data binging, picking shows is still “70 percent gut.” (Our pro-tip: Never discount the massive, crowd-pleasing appeal of the word “fuck.”)
Still, that’s not stopping the service from dipping back into this particular, unexpected well of goodies: Netflix has already ordered a second series from World creator Charlie Covell, the Greek mythology-based Kaos.